Men With Older Sisters Are Less Competitive

Trending News: Have An Older Sister? You May Not Be Competitive Enough

Why Is This Important?

Because big sisters are the worst. Well, they’re the greatest. But they’re also the worst.

Long Story Short

New research suggests men with older sisters are less competitive.

Long Story

Men and boys with older sisters tend to be less competitive, a new study has shown.

A team of researchers led by Okayama University’s Associate Professor Hiroko Okudaira invited 135 high school students and 232 university students (in a follow-up) to participate in a maze challenge and maths test under a modest piece-rate payment system and then a higher stakes tournament system. The resulting paper, Personality and Individual Differences, illustrated that while dudes overall illustrated a greater competitiveness than ladies, those dudes with older sisters were significantly less competitive than male counterparts who were never dragged along to John Hughes films or made to listen to Duran Duran records.

In the first experiment involving mazes and high-school students, 61 percent of males chose to enter the more competitive tournament system compared to 23.4 percent of females. But focusing only on those boys with an older sister, their rate of entry into the tournament option was much lower than other males, at just 38 per cent. In the second experiment with university students and maths problems, men again showed more competitiveness than women but those with an older sister were 21 per cent less likely to enter the tournament option than other men.

The researchers found the results held even when accounting for the influence of other potentially complicating factors, such as risk aversion and overconfidence. (As a crazy side note, the researchers found that females with an older sister were more competitive, leading them to behave more like an average man than an average woman.)

So WTF is going on? The researchers have two related theories. The first is role assimilation, where people absorb the gender typical traits of their siblings — e.g. young men getting right into John Hughes films and Duran Duran records. The second is down to research that shows later-borns are often found to be less competitive than first borns, perhaps due to evolutionary aspects such as the pressure to meet parental expectations and the need to defend their stakes against younger rivals.

So basically, dudes, you can cut all this one of two ways: 1) If you don’t have an older sister you have a greater chance of being successful, or 2) If you don’t have an older sister you have a greater chance of being a stone cold jerk.

Own The Conversation

Ask The Big Question: Does this study hold for cultural differences?

Disrupt Your Feed: How popular are The Breakfast Club and Duran Duran in Japan anyway?

Drop This Fact: According to 2011 research from the University of Chicago, men are 94 percent more likely than women to apply for a job with a salary potential that is dependent on outperforming their colleagues.